Complexity of Value ≠ Complexity of Outcome

Among target faculty listing meta-ethics as their area of study moral realism's lead is much smaller: 42.5% for moral realism and 38.2% against.

Looking further through the philpapers data, a big chunk of the belief in moral realism seems to be coupled with theism, where anti-realism is coupled with atheism and knowledge of science. The more a field is taught at Catholic or other religious colleges (medieval philosophy, bread-and-butter courses like epistemology and logic) the more moral realism, while philosophers of science go the other way. Philosophers of religion are 87% moral realist, while philosophers of biology are 55% anti-realist.

In general, only 61% of respondents "accept" rather than lean towards atheism, and a quarter don't even lean towards atheism. Among meta-ethics specialists, 70% accept atheism, indicating that atheism and subject knowledge both predict moral anti-realism. If we restricted ourselves to the 70% of meta-ethics specialists who also accept atheism I would bet at at least 3:1 odds that moral anti-realism comes out on top.

Since the Philpapers team will be publishing correlations between questions, such a bet should be susceptible to objective adjudication within a reasonable period of time.

A similar pattern shows up for physicalism.

In general, those interquestion correlations should help pinpoint any correct contrarian cluster.

Many posts here strongly dismiss [moral realism and simplicity], effectively allocating near-zero probability to them. I want to point out that this is a case of non-experts being very much at odds with expert opinion and being clearly overconfident. [...] For non-experts, I really can't see how one could even get to 50% confidence in anti-realism, much less the kind of 98% confidence that is typically expressed here.

One person's modus ponens is another's modus tollens. You say that professional philosophers' disagreement implies that antirealists shouldn't be so confident, but my confidence in antirealism is such that I am instead forced to downgrade my confidence in professional philosophers. I defer to experts in mathematics and science, where I can at least understand something of what it means for a mathematical or scientific claim to be true. But on my current understanding of the world, moral realism just comes out as nonsense. I know what it means for a computation to yield this-and-such a result, or for a moral claim to be true with respect to such-and-these moral premises that might be held by some agent. But what does it mean for a moral claim to be simply true, full stop? What experiment could you perform to tell, even in principle? If the world looks exactly the same whether murder is intrinsically right or intrinsically wrong, what am I supposed to do besides say that there simply is no fact of the matter, and proceed with my life just as before?

I realize how arrogant it must seem for young, uncredentialled (not even a Bachelor's!) me to conclude that brilliant professional philosophers who have devoted their entire lives to studying this topic are simply confused. But, disturbing as it may be to say ... that's how it really looks.

Toby, I spent a while looking into the meta-ethical debates about realism. When I thought moral realism was a likely option on the table, I meant:

Strong Moral Realism: All (or perhaps just almost all) beings, human, alien or AI, when given sufficient computing power and the ability to learn science and get an accurate map-territory distinction, will agree on what physical state the universe ought to be transformed into, and therefore they will assist you in transforming it into this state.

But modern philosophers who call themselves "realists" don't mean anything nearly this strong. They mean that that there are moral "facts". But what use is it if the paperclipper agrees that it is a "moral fact" that human rights ought to be respected, if it then goes on to say it has no desire to act according to the prescription of moral facts, and moral facts can't somehow revoke it.

The force of "scientific facts" is that they constrain the world. If an alien wants to get from Andromeda to here, it has to take at least 2.5 million years, the physical fact of the finite speed of light literally stops the alien from getting here sooner, whether it likes it or not.

The 56.3/27.7% split on philpapers seems to me to be an argument about whether you should be allowed to attach the word "fact" to your preferences, kind of as a shiny badge of merit, without actually disagreeing on any physical prediction about the world. The debate between weak moral realists and antirealists sounds like the debate where two people ask "if a tree falls in the forest, does it really make a sound?" - they're not arguing about anything substantive.

So, I ask, how many philosophers are strong moral realists, in the sense I defined?

EDIT: After seeing Carl's comment, it seems likely to me that there probably are a bunch of theists who would, in fact, support the strong moral realism position; but they're clowns, so who cares.

I am a moral cognitivist. Statements like "ceteris paribus, happiness is a good thing" have truth-values. Such moral statements simply are not compelling or even interesting enough to compute the truth-value of to the vast majority of agents, even those which maximize coherent utility functions using Bayesian belief updating (that is, rational agents) or approximately rational agents.

AFAICT the closest official term for what I am is "analytic descriptivist", though I believe I can offer a better defense of analytic descriptivism than what I've read so far.

EDIT: Looking up moral naturalism shows that Frank Jackson's analytic descriptivism aka moral functionalism is listed as a form of moral naturalism: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/#JacMorFun

Note similarity to "Joy in the Merely Good".

From your SEP link on Moral Realism: "It is worth noting that, while moral realists are united in their cognitivism and in their rejection of error theories, they disagree among themselves not only about which moral claims are actually true but about what it is about the world that makes those claims true. "

I think this is good cause for breaking up that 56%. We should not take them as a block merely because (one component of) their conclusions match, if their justifications are conflicting or contradictory. It could still be the case that 90% of expert philosophers reject any given argument for moral realism. (This would be consistent with my view that those arguments are silly.)

I may have noticed this because the post on Logical Rudeness is fresh in my mind.

The right response to moral realism isn't to dispute it's truth but to simply observe you don't understand the concept.

I mean imagine someone started going around insisting some situations were Heret and others were Grovic but when asked to explain what made a situation Heret or Grovic he simply shrugged and said they were primitive concepts. But you persist and after observing his behavior for a period of time you work out some principle that perfectly predicts which category he will assign a given situation to, even counterfactually but when you present the algorithm to him and ask, "Ohh so is it satisfying this principle that makes one Heret rather than Grovic?" he insists that while your notion will always agrees with his notion that's not what he means. Moreover, he insists that no definition in terms of physical state could capture these concepts.

Confused you press him and he says that there are special things which we can't casually interact with that determine Heret or Grovic status. Bracketing your skepticism you ask him to say what properties these new ontological objects must have. After listing a couple he adds that most importantly they can't just be random things with this structure but they also have to be Heret making or Grovic making and that's what distingushes them from all the other casually inaccessible things out there that might otherwise yield some slightly different class of things as Heret and Grovic.

Frustrated you curse the guy saying he hasn't really told you anything since you didn't know what it meant to be Heret or Grovic in the first place so you surely don't know what it means to be Heret making or Grovic making. The man's reply is simply to shrug and say, "well it's a fundamental concept, if you don't understand I can't explain it to you anymore than I could explain the perceptual experience of redness to a man who had never experienced color."

In such a situation the only thing you can do is give up on the notion of Heret and Grovic. Debating about whether to say it's an incoherent notion, a concept you lack the facilities to comprehend or something else would just waste time with a useless word game. Ultimately you just have to ignore such talk as something that lacks content for you and treat it the same way as you would meaningless gibberish.

The fact that when moral realists say the same thing about good and evil they are using the same sounds that we understand to mean something different shouldn't change the situation at all.

Could you direct us to the best arguments for moral realism, or against anti-realism? Thanks!

I accept this may be a case of the Popularization Bias (speaking for myself). I'd like to see some posts on the arguments against anti-realism...

This point has given me a lot of pause, so forgive me my many replies. Part of the problem is that even if I were only 60% confident of moral anti-realism, I would still act on it as if I were 100% confident because I don't understand moral realism at all, and my 60% confidence is in the belief that no-one else does either.

Can you give pointers to prominent naturalist realists?

My impression of academic philosophers is that their 'expertise' is primarily in knowledge of what other philosophers have said and in the forms of academic philosophical argument. It is not expertise in true facts about the world. In other words, I would defer to their expertise on the technical details of academically accepted definitions of philosophical terms, or on the writings of Kant, much as I would defer to an expert in literary criticism on the details of what opinions other literary critics have expressed. In neither case however do I consider their opinions to be particularly relevant to the pursuit of true facts about the world.

The fact that the survey you link finds 27% of philosophers 'accept or lean towards non-physicalism' increases my confidence in the above thesis.

Even for experts in meta-ethics, I can't see how their confidence can get outside the 30%-70% range given the expert disagreement. For non-experts, I really can't see how one could even get to 50% confidence in anti-realism, much less the kind of 98% confidence that is typically expressed here.

It depends on the expertise; for instance, if we're talking about systems of axioms, then mathematicians may be those with the most relevant opinions as to whether one system has preference over others. And the idea that a unique system of moral axioms would have preference over all others makes no mathematical sense. If philosphers were espousing the n-realism position ("there are systems of moral axioms that are more true than others, but there will probably be many such systems, most mutually incompatible"), then I would have a hard time arguing against this.

But, put quite simply, I dismiss the moral realistic position for the moment as the arguments go like this:

• 1) There are moral truths that have special status; but these are undefined, and it is even undefined what makes them have this status.
• 2) These undefined moral truths make a consistent system.
• 3) This system is unique, according to criteria that are also undefined.
• 4) Were we to discover this system, we should follow it, for reasons that are also undefined.

There are too many 'undefined's in there. There is also very little philosphical literature I've encountred on 2), 3) and 4), which is at least as important as 1). A lot of the literature on 1) seems to be reducible to linguistic confusion, and (most importantly) different moral realists have different reasons for believing 1), reasons that are often contradictory.

From a outsider's perspective, these seem powerful reasons to assume that philosphers are mired in confusion on this issue, and that their opinions are not determining. My strong mathematical reasons for claiming that there is no "superiority total ordering" on any general collection of systems of axioms clinches the argument for me, pending further evidence.

Looking further through the philpapers data, a big chunk of the belief in moral realism seem to be coupled with theism, where anti-realism is coupled with atheism and knowledge of science. The more a field is taught at Catholic or other religious colleges (medieval philosophy, bread-and-butter courses like epistemology and logic) the more moral realism, while philosophers of science go the other way. Philosophers of religion are 87% moral realist, while philosophers of biology are 55% anti-realist.

In general, only 61% of respondents "accept" rather than lean towards atheism, and a quarter don't even lean towards atheism. Among meta-ethics specialists, 70% accept atheism, indicating that atheism and subject knowledge both predict moral anti-realism. If we restricted ourselves to the 70% of meta-ethics specialists who also accept atheism I would bet at at least 3:1 odds that moral anti-realism comes out on top.

Since the Philpapers team will be publishing correlations between questions, such a bet should be susceptible to objective adjudication within a reasonable period of time.

A similar pattern shows up for physicalism.

In general, those interquestion correlations should help pinpoint any correct contrarian cluster.

I don't see in what meaningful sense these people are "experts".

Is there a reason I should care about the % of any group of people that think this or that? Just give us the argument, or write another article about it. It sounds interesting.

Aww, I wanted to play with him. ;)

Density. Yes my sentences are very dense. If I change that I would be in violation of my own constraints. Let me try this. I assert and the Model asserts: "We" are falsely dichotomous (?) in our use of the word technology. If a mechanism or machine is non carbon based then it is technological. If a mechanism or machine is organic it is not technological. I assert, that the existential difference between them is an illusion. The model describes a hierarchy that dispels the illusion.

Change of context.

All complexities/simplicities have inner or internal attributes and outer or external attributes. If the universe is a complexity/simplicity, then it follows that the universe too must have external and internal attributes.

I believe that the model asserts that There is a God and God gave rise to this rational complex universe. I am a new order Rationalist of the Christian sect.

Hence Christian Neo-Rationalist.

Would you share some of your reflections on Value and Complexity with me in the context of my previous assertion?

edit: Maybe it would be helpful to assert that this false dichotomy applies equally to levers and pendulums. They are just different forms of the same thing.

Are you talking about Kolmogorov complexity or something else? Because the outcome which optimizes a simple goal would have a low Kolmogorov complexity.

AFAICS, it is only members of this community that think this way.

Who are you referring to here? I myself wrote "Simple values do not necessarily lead to simple outcomes either."

Here's Eliezer's position on that question as of 2004.

As I see it, you can all treat me affectionately as your own personal crazy. Enjoy me. Criticize my definitions and and my structures. I would love that. That is why I came here. I was looking for intelligent criticism of my model. What I got instead was upsetting and ridicule. I have a neurological disorder and it was acting up. I didn't think. Then after adjusting my meds and my diet I realized that voting down my comments was irrelevant as I could reproduce them on my blog anyway. I overreacted. I'm sorry if I offended anyone. My partner usually has my back, but he didn't know that I was getting upset. My wife was the one who alerted me to it. Anyway I am going through the sequences which is where you are supposed to start. So I can do my thing here or on my blog and on my Face Book page.

You decide.

I tried to delete my profile and all my comments But to no avail. So until you delete "all" of my content and any references to those comments which are my property, then I will continue to post and link my posts on my blog so that others may see how you treat eccentrics edge dwellers and free thinkers - and how quickly you discount radical ideas as green ink.

I urge you to engage with this user only if you want them to stay here. There is no argument that will convince a rock.

Yes it is, that is a good point.

Our own values change over time

I tend to file this under "humans are stupid." Messy creatures like ourselves undergo value drift, but decision-theoretically speaking, systems designed to optimize for some particular criterion have a natural incentive to keep that criterion. Cf. "The Basic AI Drives."

Can we really expect a superintelligence to stick with the values we give it ?

Yes.

I don't see how we can bound a superintelligence without doing more computation than we expect it to do in its lifetime.

I once proved that a program will print out only prime numbers endlessly. I really, really wish I kept the working out.

Quite a bit of ink has been spilled on this issue. Eliezer Yudkowsky and Steve Omohundro have argued that it is possible. Have you examined their arguments?

Nothing changes from the inside, unless it is preprogrammed for.

In some cases, unfortunately. However, in this case, democracy trumps spam.

Yes, this community is hopeless like that; best to give up now.